


ours are the moments i play in the dark

by thelemonisinplay



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Friendship/Love, Martha Jones Deserves Better, POV Martha Jones, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Pre-Relationship, Work/Life Balance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:54:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24099163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelemonisinplay/pseuds/thelemonisinplay
Summary: Martha and Mickey had never spoken when they left with Jack after saving the world (again). By the time the Doctor regenerates, they're married.How do we get there?(friendships and breakups and time off work, is how)
Relationships: Jack Harkness & Martha Jones, Jack Harkness & Mickey Smith, Martha Jones & Tish Jones, Martha Jones/Mickey Smith, Martha Jones/Thomas Milligan (mentioned)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	ours are the moments i play in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> in my quarantine-inspired return to doctor who i have yet to see martha/mickey as the focus of anything. so here we are. pre-relationship mind you, i am by no means a romance writer, but, you know. it's a start.
> 
> title from supercut by lorde, as ever i hate titles.

Martha’s first real conversation with Mickey is in a Costa on the corner of a road near her London home. They’ve just saved the universe – well, multiple universes – from the Daleks yet again, and spent a little bit of time catching up with old friends in the TARDIS, and now the two of them and Jack have left together. London is a little unexpected, but she supposes none of them actually specified where they wanted to go, and given she and Jack are currently based in two different cities the Doctor must have just taken his best guess

Anyway, neither of them can get transport back to where they’re supposed to be just yet, and they’re all exhausted, and in any case Mickey is realising that no matter how decided he’d just been on coming back to live in this universe, it had been several years since he’d lived here, and had no home to go to, no money, and no possessions beyond what he was wearing.

So they end up in a Costa Coffee. Jack pays for all of them (Martha offers. Jack points out that he’s had longer to accrue money and isn’t currently paying rent in both London and New York). 

They chat, the three of them. Martha and Jack catch up: she speaks of her engagement and her promotion and her family; he talks about picking up the pieces after all the deaths at work. Mickey and Jack catch up: Mickey has stories of regeneration and Cybermen and hopping between worlds; Jack tells tales of Slitheen and immortality and a Dalek invasion both long ago and far, far in the future. Martha and Mickey have basic introductions and interjections in each other’s stories as they work out how things link together.

Mickey, it turns out, was there the day her cousin died at Canary Wharf. So was Ianto, according to Jack. And of course, the Doctor, and Rose Tyler, who seemed to be everywhere all at once, linking their three histories together without their knowledge.

Jack offers them both jobs. Torchwood Three is running low on staff, these days.

Martha declines, for now: she’s got to deal with the fallout of all of this in New York, and she’s got a fiancé in London, and moving to Cardiff on a whim because her friend asked seems to be a bit of a rash decision. But maybe later, she says; once she’s had a bit of time to organise her life.

Mickey accepts. He doesn’t have anything in this universe anymore, he’s got the relevant experience, and Jack’s probably the only employer who won’t ask questions about the fact that he’s legally dead.

–

A couple of hours later she walks into her flat with Tom, for the first time in - ooh, two months, now - and pulls him close. He’s not expecting her, of course; she isn’t due back til the end of the month on a planned excursion, a planned break from UNIT.

But she’s tired, and she’s been dumped in London, and after so long without seeing him she can’t bring herself to leave the city without at least without popping in to see her fiancé. Besides, she doesn’t have any method of getting back, anymore, so she’ll have to fly, and that needs to be thought about a little bit in advance. So she goes home, first; she’ll call work later.

They catch up, too: the planets in the sky is the immediate, obvious concern, of course ( _of course_ ), and Martha fills him in on how they’d solved that particular problem; but there’s UNIT to speak of, too, and her family, and two months’ worth of events from his life – his family and his job and his patients (they’ve spoken on the phone, of course, but some stories are better told face to face).

Things are a little stilted, but Martha puts that down to a combination of exhaustion and time apart.

She goes back to New York the next day.

–

They break up over the phone, another week down the line.

Because she was right before, it was stilted. And maybe that was down to her sheer lack of sleep and the two months they’d been apart, but that meeting seems to awaken him to issues in their relationship. He can’t handle the distance anymore, he’d thought he could, but her reappearing with no notice only to disappear again? And that’s just what life’s going to be like?

She tries to argue it - says she wants to come back to London anyway, really, it’s where almost everybody she loves is; but he makes the point that she’ll always be working bizarre hours and putting the job first, and when he’s already a doctor and they already barely saw each other when they lived together? They rushed into this, and now the consequences have found them.

She can’t argue with that.

She does ask UNIT for a transfer back to London anyway, though, and another month later she’s back. Home. Stays with Tish initially, ostensibly til she finds her own place (Tom kept the flat, obviously; he was actually living in it), but they find they quite like living together in adulthood. She can’t bring herself to move back in with Mum, no matter how much she loves her.

UNIT ask her to liaise with Torchwood on something before she starts back properly, though, so she finds herself in Cardiff just days after landing in London. She’s jetlagged still, exhausted; and it takes her a little longer than usual to solve the problem, especially on her own with no other medics to consult with like she’s used to. Jack notices, of course.

“You need a break,” he says. She wants to argue, but - “you’ve been nonstop since I met you, Martha Jones, and just because a year didn’t happen on official terms, just because it was erased, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen for you.”

“You haven’t had a break either,” she argues, feebly.

“Listen. Mickey Smith was here for a little while, but once I was sure he had his paperwork sorted and enough money to look after himself, I sent him off on a break, too, because it seems like he’s not really had one in a few years, either. I think he’s travelling Europe. Give him a call, or spend a week watching television at home, but you can’t keep going like this.”

He has a point, she supposes. Even if you only count time that had officially happened, time that hadn’t been reset for all but a handful of people, she’s qualified as a doctor, got a job and then a promotion, got a boyfriend then engaged then been broken up with, and saved the world god only knows how many times just in the past year or so. Maybe she does need a break.

She finishes up the Torchwood job with hugs to what’s left of the team and heads back to London with Mickey Smith’s phone number scrawled on a bit of paper in her pocket. Just in case.

-

She doesn’t bring it up with work immediately, feeling it might be pushing it a bit to request a transfer and then immediately take a leave of absence, but a few weeks in her line manager pulls her aside to ask if everything’s alright. and, well, that’s two people asking after her welfare in a fairly short timespan. So she asks.

Two months off is what she’s given. It seems a very long time. But then she _is_ one of their best.

Tish takes the first week off with her, and they spend the whole time relaxing: visiting their parents and Leo, going to the cinema, cooking together, discovering local parks. And then once Tish is back at work, she calls Mickey Smith.

Who, as it happens, has just got back to London from Barcelona.

He’s staying with an old friend in Peckham, who was apparently surprisingly blasé about Mickey showing up from the dead. This makes Martha laugh, wonder what kind of madness this poor friend dealt with back when the Doctor was in and out of their estate before alternate universes got involved.

“I’m looking for my own place anyway,” says Mickey. “Jack said he’d give me as long as I need, but I’m starting to think I’m better off in London than Cardiff.”

They’re in another coffee shop. Starbucks, this time. 

Martha nods in agreement. She gets it, of course, she just flew back from New York to be here again.

“Is it weird adjusting back to this London?” Martha asks. “Rather than the other one, i mean.”

“Oh, you don’t even know,” says Mickey with a grin, which then disappears almost as quickly as it arrived. There’s a pause, while he stares into space. “It’s weird not really knowing anyone anymore, you know? All my friends from before - I’ve not seen them in, ooh, six years now maybe, and as far as they concerned I just disappeared presumed dead two years ago. And obviously Rose -”

He stops there for a bit, just enough time for the petty, jealous part of Martha to wonder if she’s doomed to spent the rest of her life haunted by the memory of Rose Tyler; and just enough time for the practical, logical part to crawl back and remind Martha that she’s _met_ Rose, that she liked her, that people mentioning her name doesn’t mean they’re comparing or ranking the two of them.

“Well, Rose isn’t there anymore either anyway,” Mickey says. He grins again, something which sticks around this time. “And I’m really glad I’m not there on my own trying to explain why she didn’t end up coming back to work.”

He laughs, and then so does Martha, and suddenly she’s comfortable again.

“Have you seen them?” she asks.

“Oh, no,” says Mickey. “No, they’ll show up in six months’ time in the middle of some big drama, all still in the same clothes because it’s only been an hour for them, and somehow they’ll save the day hand-in-hand because they can’t possibly let go of each other after all this time apart.”

He says it with an eye roll and a half-joking tone, but she sees the gentleness of the smile underneath.

“I believe that,” she says, matching the jokey tone with relief because god, she’s never really been able to talk about this with anyone. “Do you know how much time I spent in that TARDIS hearing about how sad and lonely he was without Rose Tyler? Honestly, it was almost worse than my parents’ divorce.”

“You think _you_ had it bad? I had to pick up the pieces her end. We drove all the way to Norway six months after Canary Wharf because of some dream she was having, because he was burning up an entire sun so they could have a two-minute goodbye.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” says Martha. “Talk about romantic gestures.”

Mickey grins again at that, and Martha feels a little bit bad for making light of what was obviously such a difficult time for the Doctor and Rose, but not bad enough to stop. Not when there’s someone grinning at her like this.

–

They meet up fairly frequently after that, sometimes for coffee and a chat, sometimes for drinks, sometimes to wander London so they can both get their bearings back.

Jack pops down every now and then, and nods carefully when they both apologetically tell him they’re happier in London. Martha puts him in touch with the head of recruitment at UNIT. Sarah Jane meets them once or twice. Some of Martha’s UNIT friends come once, having not really seen her since she went to New York; they try to convince Mickey to apply.

Usually, though, it’s just the two of them. They’re the only ones with so much time on their hands at the moment.

It’s nice. It’s easy.

They talk about growing up in London: her in the chaos of two bickering parents and two siblings in the east; him raised by his gran on an estate in the south. Her path to studying medicine which she’d really had to decide on by sixteen in order to pick the right A-level subjects; his getting a job with a mechanic via an apprenticeship in his teens.

They talk about the places they’ve been: Martha’s travelled the whole world, of course, whilst Mickey’s been to seemingly endless parallel versions of London, but they’ve both been across time and space – spaceships in the fifty-first century which bizarrely lead to pre-revolutionary France; the very end of the universe; Shakespeare’s London.

They talk about the people they know: Martha’s family, and Jack, and everyone at UNIT, and a couple of people from medical school she’s still in touch with. Mickey’s family aren’t really around anymore and the surrogate family he found in the Tylers aren’t either, but he knows Jack, and the handful of friends he’s reunited with here, and then there’s some Torchwood stories from his other life.

And they talk about Rose, and the Doctor. Less and less over time, but it would be hard to avoid talking about them entirely. He grew up around Rose, after all, and the Doctor changed both of their lives so completely.

Mickey does apply to UNIT, in the end: he’s had a bit of time off, and he’s got himself a flat of his own now, and not only is he running out of money but he’s running out of things to do with himself all by himself. He starts about six weeks into Martha’s two month allotted holiday period, which gives her another couple of weeks to kill all by herself.

It’s very boring, suddenly, having nothing to do. No job. No fiancé. No aliens. No company, even, except for in the evenings and at weekends.

“The boredom’s a good thing,” says Tish when Martha complains one evening. “Means you’re probably ready to be back.”

-

And back she goes. Has to retrain somewhat because she’s been gone so long which is frustrating, but doing something feels good again rather than draining. She thanks her line manager profusely and lets him know he was right, and makes sure to thank Jack, too. For looking out for her.

She sees Mickey at lunch, and at drinks after work, but she finds herself missing him. _You’ve only known him a couple of months_ , she says to herself, _calm down_ , but the thing about Martha is: she _always_ falls fast.

The Doctor solved the mystery of why they were on the moon, saved their lives, kissed her, all in one day, and that was that for months. Tom Milligan was nice to her in a time that never happened for him, and she found him, and they spent a year together. Maybe she ought to slow things down, this time.

So she does. She sees him in group settings and she chats to him, but she doesn’t push for one on one time. She doesn’t want to encourage a little crush, and she doesn’t particularly want to fall into another relationship so soon after ending an engagement. But she’ll see him with friends, around friends, and she doesn’t avoid him if they happen to be in a room alone. She’s trying to be normal about it.

“Have you heard anything from the Doctor?” he asks her at lunch the day of the Christmas party.

“No,” she says, “but I’m sure he’ll show up at Christmas. Something always happens at Christmas.”

Mickey nods. “Yeah. That’s what I thought, so I tried calling Rose, make sure they at least come and say hi, you know? But it’s coming up saying her number doesn’t exist.”

He shows Martha the phone screen, and she frowns.

“Are you sure it’s the right number?” she asks, pulling up Rose’s number herself and giving it a try. “Or she’s not, I dunno, got a new phone?”

Same screen.

“The last time this happened with Rose’s number,” says Mickey, slowly, and Martha sees where he’s going before he finishes the sentence and absolutely wishes she couldn’t, “we were in two separate universes.”

“I thought she spent all that time trying to come back here,” says Martha, “I thought – why would she –“

Mickey pulls a face. “Maybe she didn’t have a choice.”

Martha remembers his stories: Rose, sent home, furious to be left out of the Doctor and Jack saving the world (and she knows the end of that, pieced it together from fractions she’s heard from different people: looks into the Time Vortex, brings Jack back to life, causes the Doctor to regenerate); Rose, sent to a parallel world to be with her family (where she pops back, only to end up there anyway entirely by accident). Remembers all the little choices she didn’t get to make, either, before the big one to leave him behind.

“He wouldn’t,” she says, anyway. Obviously he has, before, obviously it fits in with patterns of behaviour, but Martha had spent months upon months hearing all about how good Rose was; had watched the Doctor tear himself into shreds with guilt and grief over her. He surely wouldn’t send her away after all that.

“There’s two of him now,” says Mickey. “And he was always wanting to make sure she could stay with Jackie, and especially now she’s got a little brother, maybe…”

He trails off.

Martha tries to imagine it. The Doctor. _Both_ Doctors. Rose, who if Mickey is to be believed, worked herself near death trying to return to her original universe. And her family.

“You think one of him stayed over there with her?” says Martha. It sounds ridiculous when it comes out of her mouth.

Mickey shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. He looks uncertain, like he believes in his theory but isn’t sure how he feels about it.

Martha feels vaguely outraged, though she’s not fully convinced. All that work Rose put in, all that _grief_ Martha listened to without knowing exactly how to deal with … and then he goes and does this? Doesn’t give Rose and Mickey a chance to say goodbye despite all their history?

She tries Donna’s number. Gets halfway through a _hello it’s Martha how are you_ before Donna tells her she doesn’t know any Marthas, she must have the wrong number, and hangs up.

Martha feels cold inside and doesn’t even try calling the Doctor.

-

They’re both clearly very much in their own heads about the whole affair that evening: despite the free alcohol, neither of them drinks much. Mickey hovers around the nibbles, chatting amicably when people approach but otherwise staring blankly into space. Martha gets pulled into conversation after conversation, but makes excuses to leave each one.

And then she’s annoyed with herself.

Yes, evidence suggests that something has happened to Donna Noble. Yes, it’s possible that the Doctor has made a decision for Rose Tyler that might mean Mickey can never again see his ex-girlfriend-turned-best-friend.

But concerning though that is, none of it is actually Martha’s problem, especially not at her Christmas party. And from what she’s heard, Mickey has spent an entire lifetime worrying about Rose.

She can try to investigate Donna’s situation in the morning. Neither of them will know either way about Rose without seeing the Doctor. Being anxious and scared over hypotheticals their friends might be facing when there’s nothing they can do to help is not the way to spend a Christmas party.

So Martha strolls over to Mickey, pulls him onto the dancefloor, and tells him to save his worries for the morning.

-

Later, she’ll say their relationship started after New Year, when he asked her out for a drink (“like, a date, I mean,” he clarifies quickly; "the others aren't invited.").

He’ll say he only asked in the first place because of that dance, that distraction from the inside of his own head when he needed it.

(They don’t ever get confirmation on what happened with Donna, but the Doctor is alone the next and final time they see him, and they never do see Rose again.)


End file.
